September 29, 2020

expert reaction to latest COVID-19 cases and deaths

The government have released the latest daily figures for cases of (7,143) and deaths from (71) COVID-19.

Prof James Naismith FRS FRSE FMedSci, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, and University of Oxford, said:

“If the 7000 positive cases reported today are distributed across age groups, then we can expect a few tens of deaths to result and perhaps 100 or more people with long lasting complications.  There is nothing benign about COVID-19, although for most young people it is a trivial illness.

“It is disappointing in the extreme that the real time data for positive tests in the UK have once again become very noisy, this makes its very hard to discern clear trends.  Unless the data quality improve, it could require up to two weeks of such daily figures to be certain of the success or otherwise of current restriction measures.

“Hospital admissions are much less subject to problems in measuring and reporting.  The pattern here suggests a doubling time of around two weeks, something similar is seen by looking at the number of patients on ventilators.  We can safely assume there are no false positives or mis-diagnosis in those data.

“In contrast to scientifically groundless claims that there is no increased spread, we can now be certain the virus spread has accelerated in September.  The problem with using hospital data reported today is that it measures what happened two weeks ago.  I share a no doubt widespread frustration, that we have a two week lag in monitoring the effectiveness of the most recent social interventions.  It is my fervent hope that this time round we will avoid judging the virus by counting the number of tragedies.”

Dr Simon Clarke, Associate Professor of Cellular Microbiology at the University of Reading, said:

“This is a very sobering increase in diagnosed coronavirus infections after the climb had appeared to ease over the past few days.  We’ve not seen such a large increase since May but this is an important lesson that we need to look at trends over the period of a week rather than seize single day’s figures as evidence of a trend.  The world has now passed the grim milestone of a million COVID-19 deaths and we are likely to see increasing hospitalisations and deaths.  The small silver lining is that the advances over the past seven months in treatments such as dexamethasone may mean that some deaths may be avoidable.”

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

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